HSG students support St. Gallen soup kitchen

‘It was important to us not to treat social responsibility in an abstract way, but to tackle it where help is needed immediately,’ says HSG student Maximilian Daugeras. With this in mind, he and his fellow students Tibauld Vincent, Hannes Dörting and Leonardo Del Mondo spent a day working at the St. Gallen soup kitchen ('Gassenküche') run by the Stiftung Suchthilfe. This social institution provides affordable meals to people with alcohol, drug or behavioural problems and offers them a space for socialising and further support.

Students implement small social projects in the region

The five students worked at the soup kitchen in December 2025 as part of the HSG master's course ‘Sustainable Start-ups’. In this course, students implement small social or ecological projects within a few months. The aim is to generate regional impact while promoting entrepreneurial thinking among students.

The Gassenküche seemed to the group to be a suitable place to have the greatest possible impact: locally based, low-threshold and in direct contact with people in precarious situations. ‘We didn't just want to talk about problems, we wanted to provide concrete support on the ground,’ says Daugeras.

Students collect donations

On site, the students took on tasks in the regular kitchen operations. They helped with meal preparation, cooking, serving food and cleaning up afterwards. The encounters during the meal service were particularly impressive. ‘Short conversations, gratitude, but also reserve and distance – everything existed side by side,’ reports Daugeras.

The experience changed their view of social work. 'Facilities such as the soup kitchen play a central role in providing stability and dignity in the everyday lives of many people. This work is continuous, often invisible and yet socially indispensable,' says Daugeras.

The students want to continue helping beyond this one-off assignment: as a group, they are now continuing an independent fundraising initiative to support the work of the soup kitchen.